Star Trek - The Bear and Badger

ChopperByrne

I said they tried. Next Gen, or particularly Voyager could have had a once off piece of techno babble explain that Starfleet tried again with the Excelsior but it failed again. Would explain why it had a normal warp drive the next time it was seen.

EvilRedEye

Time_on_my_hands wrote:

ChopperByrne wrote:

They at least tried to explain away Starfleet not using transwarp because Scotty sabotaged it on the Excelsior making it look like a failure.

Which also makes no sense because it indicates that they never did any analysis on the Excelsior's failure - Scotty's sabotage was just to rip out a few components, so you'd think that it would be obvious.

I just checked Memory Alpha and apparently Voyager had some technobabble that it turned out most dilithium crystals became dangerously unstable at transwarp speeds using the Excelsior transwarp design (except the special Delta quadrant dilithium crystals they found in that episode). This was that weird episode where Janeway and Paris went to Warp 10 and turned into lizards that is semi-non-canon now though.

Time_on_my_hands

The whole thing about a saga being crushed by the weight of continuity is why for a long running franchise I prefer the James Bond or Mad Max method, whereby there are thematic links stitched together by heresay and unreliable storytelling.

Star Trek can't function lke LotR because it's being reinvented all the time. It's already killing the MCU and Star Wars.

ChopperByrne

Which is why they should have just set shows after Voyager. They already know what's established, and can invent any new shite they want.

Diluted Dante

Time_on_my_hands wrote:

The whole thing about a saga being crushed by the weight of continuity is why for a long running franchise I prefer the James Bond or Mad Max method, whereby there are thematic links stitched together by heresay and unreliable storytelling. Star Trek can't function lke LotR because it's being reinvented all the time. It's already killing the MCU and Star Wars.

The solution is easy. Either go forward, or work under the limitations. You aren't going to make a WW2 film that includes GPS. If you absolutely have to have GPS in the film then the WW2 setting isn't appropriate. If the WW2 setting is crucial, then GPS isn't appropriate.

People bang on about limits to creativity, but if anything you have to be more creative to work around the limitations you have.

RedDave2

ChopperByrne wrote:

Which is why they should have just set shows after Voyager. They already know what's established, and can invent any new shite they want.

This. Discovery would have been pretty much identical if it was set after voyager. It had no benefit to being in the past - ok they used spock and pike as characters but the pike character could have been a future descendant and spoke is so different to both original series and movie versions that it may as well be a new character.

mannaboy

*Dr Spoke.

ChopperByrne

They absolutely could have done an extremist Klingon takeover that thinks their alliance with the Federation has made them weak, which is why the Dominion didn't fear them. Go on the offensive against the Federation. Burnham does something stupid. Plays out just the same.

superflyninja

You are correct, Discovery should be set post Voyager. But you most likely know more about Trek than the writers of Discovery. It really feels like they have a light surface knowledge but no real concept of what Trek is.

EvilRedEye

Bit suspicious of the Picard Season 2 premier. Some pretty dodgy writing in there.

Spoiler:

I'm not quite writing it off yet though.

monkey

Oh fuck not more Picard.

g.man

God help us!

mannaboy

Ere are you still watching Discovery? Couldn’t get through more than ten minutes of episode two. Jumped forward to episode ten (ten forward ha) and turned off pretty quickly, just hate the future setting and still prevalent emoting go on with the crew.

mannaboy

Picard was ok, made it through the episode. Will we really need digital wine bottle labels in the future, a show posing real questions.

EvilRedEye

mannaboy wrote:

Ere are you still watching Discovery? Couldn’t get through more than ten minutes of episode two. Jumped forward to episode ten (ten forward ha) and turned off pretty quickly, just hate the future setting and still prevalent emoting go on with the crew.

I can't be bothered to try until Paramount+ launches in the UK. I wanna watch Strange New Worlds when it comes out so I'll probably watch it alongside that.

Questor

I enjoyed Picard, random exposition lines aside

Spoiler:

mannaboy

@ere, yeah hopeful Strange New Worlds is decent too.

n0face

The Borg are so dull

Raiziel

mannaboy wrote:

@ere, yeah hopeful Strange New Worlds is decent too.

My last hope for Star Trek. I’ve discovered The Orville on Disney+ though, so I’m okay for a bit.

g.man

Picard. Dear God, it's only the fucking Borg again!
Also, The Federation literally moved old testicle face from one side of the universe to the other in one cut, with zero time passing!
Really? Are you fucking shitting me? Even Q would have raised an eyebrow at that nonsense.
So here we go again. Who is this even for??? Riddled with nostalgic fan-service from start to finish, only it's the sort of fan-service that seems to be generated by an algorithm with no understanding of what would actually appeal to long term fans of the show.
I probably won't live long enough to see it, but I like to think that somewhere, someday, a studio executive will have the epiphany that fan service is not a box-ticking exercise, but instead requires a detailed understanding of the source material.

superflyninja

So episode 1 of series 2 is much, much better than I thought it was going to be. There are quite decent new ship designs (the armada consisted of actual different ships). That annoying woman didn't say JL once which I appreciated and Picard's station in life is now much more believable. But the across universe insta travel was pants.
The writers making more earl grey jokes, its like that's literally all they know about Picard. Picard?? Baldy lad that likes tea int'it?
I don't hold out much hope for the series but Ill give it a whirl.

EvilRedEye

Apparently they had some assistance from the Star Trek Online team to flesh out the armada after people slagged off the one from the previous season.

I actually wasn't that bothered about Picard's magical journey - IIRC there were quite a few instances in DS9 where characters managed to jet around the Alpha Quadrant unrealistically quickly. Just one of those plot convenience things innit. Although I guess it might have felt more realistic if he'd turned up in a proper starship not a shuttle as starships are presumably faster than the TNG-to-Nemesis days and shuttles always seemed to have lower maximum warp speeds, from memory.

davyK

Picard S1 was more than enough for me. My Trek appetite runs to classic, the early films up to TNG and then non holodeck TNG. That's it.

Fancy dress Trek can fuck off into the night.

monkey

The DS9 runabouts were meant to be top of their class I think and they maxed out at (just checked) Warp 5.
It sounds like a niggly point but you can't muck around with this stuff too much. It's an absolute foundation to the storytelling. How far away is something? Is help coming? See Game of Thrones for this done well in early seasons and then very badly in later seasons. The characters are completely isolated from each other, no chance of rescue, trekking from the Wall to King's Landing can take a season. And then later on someone can get from one end of Westeros to another on a horse in the gap between one episode and the next.

monkey

I'm going to watch this new Picard and i know I'm going to hate it and I can't stop myself.

EvilRedEye

Although they've now decanonised the post-Nemesis books, I think they had Starfleet developing quantum slipstream drives post-Voyager in the same timeframe as Picard if not earlier and there's just generally been a 20+ year timeline gap for them to develop new propulsion advances so they definately could have snuck in some dialogue there to justify it instead of doing nothing.

But I think if you went looking for instances where Trek handwaved warp journeys that were in the same vague neighbourhood but on paper should still have taken a substantial length of time, you'd probably find a good few.

g.man

They literally moved him from one side of the universe to the other in less time than it would take me to empty my bladder.

Diluted Dante

I haven't seen this yet, but where are they travelling from and to?

g.man

Picard is on Earth. There is a new threat that requires his attention on the other side of the universe.
Earlier in the show they even do a pull out from Earth to demonstrate how far away the threat is. The shot pulls out across the universe passing many, many galaxies until it reaches the threat. The threat is very, very far away.
Someone picks up Picard in a ship the size of a shuttlecraft from his vineyard in France. In the next shot, Picard arrives with the shuttlecraft at the threat on the other side of the universe.
This is compounded by them pulling the old here's a battle with a new enemy that's going very badly for the Fed...then cut to 48hrs earlier, how did we get here routine at the start of the episode. Picard then fucks about on Earth for a couple of days before he is picked up by the Space-Uber
It's just really fucking lazy writing to get people where the story needs them to be. Monkey hits the nail on the head, and it's worse than GoT, because Star Trek is fundamentally about space and distance and time.
Piss tier writing.

Diluted Dante

I think my biggest issue with that is we shouldn't be leaving the Milky Way.

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